But now, unfortunately, I have to make an admission. We have, as yet, no ceramic record in either Babylonia or Assyria. Until very recently there has been no attempt in either country at scientific excavation. The pioneers, Layard and Botta and Loftus, lived and worked before it was known or thought of, and we cannot, therefore, be too thankful to Layard for having nevertheless given us so full and accurate an account of what he found, and the conditions under which he found it. The excavations controlled by the British Museum have, I am sorry to say, been for the most part destructive rather than scientific; such objects as were wanted by the Museum were alone sought after; little or no record has been kept of their discovery, and they have been mixed with objects bought from natives, of whose origin nothing was known. At one spot, Carchemish, the old Hittite capital, which, though not strictly in Assyria, formed part of the Assyrian Empire, and was the seat of an Assyrian governor, the so-called excavations conducted by the Museum in 1880 were simply a scandal, which Dr. Hayes Ward, who visited the spot shortly afterwards, has characterized as “wicked.” The archæological evidence there, which would have thrown so much light on the Hittite problem, has been irretrievably lost. Matters are better now, and if I may judge from the work done by Mr. H. R. Hall at Dêr el-Bâharî in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund, his colleague, Mr. L. W. King, who has recently been excavating for the British Museum in Assyria, will have done something to retrieve the archæological good name of our British excavators in the East. M. de Sarzec’s excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia were also conducted with some consideration for archæological method, at all events on the architectural side, and in the capable hands of M. Heuzey the works of art found there have been made to yield valuable results. Moreover, the history of Tello may be said to be comprised in a single epoch of archaic Babylonia, and all objects discovered on the site may consequently be regarded as belonging to one age and phase of Babylonian civilization. Of the American excavations at Niffer it is difficult to speak at present. The work there has been careful and patient, and has extended over a long series of years. The architectural facts have been accurately recorded, at all events in the case of the great temple of Bel, and about the sequence of the inscribed monuments there is little room for doubt. But accusations of carelessness have lately been brought by the excavators one against the other, and when we find the sharpest critic among them unable to substantiate his own account of the discovery of a library and implicitly endorsing the assignment of a Parthian palace to the “Mykenæan” age, it is impossible to put much faith in their descriptions of archæological details. Some years ago the Germans explored a cemetery at El-Hibba with considerable care